This huge mixed-use, twin-towered
project opened in early 2004 after years of controversy. The project
replaced the former New York Coliseum.

The complex consists of
retail space, offices including the headquarters of Time Warner,
a jazz facility for the nearby Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts, a Mandarin Oriental hotel, CNN TV studios and 225 condominium
apartments. It was developed by The Related Companies, Apollo
Real Estate Advisors and the Palladium Company and designed by
David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. For a while the
project was known as the AOL-Time-Warner Center but that company
eventually dropped "AOL" out of its name.

View
from the southeast

The development of this
major site at the southwestern corner of Central Park and the
western end of Central Park South after the decision to erect
a new convention center for the city near the Hudson River at
35th Street resulted in a very heated and protracted controversy.

The developers took on the
project after protests by numerous civic groups over the environmental
impact of the previous plan for the site by Boston Properties
led to a reopening of the bidding process for the site's development.
One of the issues was the length of shadows that the skyscraper
project would cast on Central Park.

Back
of Time Warner Center center from the northwest

Boston Properties had bought
the site from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for $455
million and originally commissioned a rakishly angled project
with two towers, one 68 stories and the other 58, that were designed
by Moishe Safdie. Boston Properties, headed by Mortimer Zuckerman,
had Salomon Brothers, an investment concern, as its partner and
also planned to include apartments and a shopping mall.

Safdie's
design

In his fine book, "Upper
West Side Story, a History and Guide," Abbeville Press, 1989,
Peter Salwen recalled that "Architecture critic (and Central
Park West resident) Paul Goldberger called Safdie's design 'a
grotesque intrusion' and accused the city of selling its architectural
birthright for a mess of pottage." "The Municipal Art
Society, ordinarily the most mild-mannered of civic groups, sent
out a letter signed by Goldberger's neighbor, TV pundit Bill Moyers.
It started, 'Dear New Yorker: I got mad the other day' - and went
on to tell how 'a rich developer from out of town and one of the
wealthiest companies in the city' had conspired with City Hall
to 'gang up' on Central Park....With supporters ranging from Jacqueline
Onassis to Lauren Bacall, Christopher Reeve, and James Stewart
Polshek, dean of Columbia's architecture school, the M.A.S. then
sued to invalidate Zuckerman's purchase of the city, alleging
that the environmental review process had been glossed over....A
few months later Salomon Brothers pulled out of the project. The
price of the land dropped to a mere $357 million, while Zuckerman
quietly replaced Safdie with David Childs of Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill, who re-conceived the project as a smaller, stepped
cluster of towers, sensitively designed to harmonize with the
Circle and with Central Park West's landmark twin-towered buildings."

Eventually, the city held
a new "competition" for the site and David Childs this
time was working for the winning developers.

Mr. Childs's new design
is about the same size of his last design for Boston Properties
but instead of that Post-Modern, Art Deco-style design the plan
was "modernized' with glass facades and the massing of the
towers was more sharply outlined with less architectural detailing.
The caps of the twin towers retain a piered look, and while the
towers are much lighter in color than the bronze-color recladding
by Donald Trump of the former Gulf & Western Building at 1
Central Park West (see The City
Review article) just to the north on Columbus Circle, their
glossiness is more in context with that structure than with the
very rigorous and interesting green-metal clad tower at One Central
Park Place one block to the south on the northwest corner of Eighth
Avenue and 57th Street that was designed by Davis Brody. (Safdie's
more rugged modernism was in more context with the Davis Brody
building.) The glossiness also goes fairly well with Sir Norman
Foster's notched stainless-steel and glass tower for the Hearst
Corporation one block to the south, which was completed in 2006.

View
from north on Broadway

The best feature of the
project is the very spectacular 35th floor lobby of the Mandarin
Oriental Hotel, whose entrance is on 60th Street. The luxurious
lobby has a lounge with enormous windows overlooking Central Park
and Central Park South. It is the best public view in midtown
other than the Top of the Rock observatory observatory at 30 Rockefeller
Center (see The City Review article)
that reopened in 2006.

The building's base on Columbus
Circle is a four-story retail mall that is spectacular in size
and opulently designed around a four-story-high atrium with a
large glass wall facing Central Park South. The retail mall has
curved alleys with bridges and the top floor is devoted to several
luxury restaurants. Atop the retail mall is the jazz facility
that also has spectacular windows looking across Central Park
South. In the basement of the retail mall is a very large and
popular Whole foods supermarket.

The towers are setback considerably
on the site which extends half way into the long "double"
block. There are large, albeit much smaller, residential buildings
to the west.

A pale imitation of the
great high-rise architectural heritage of Central Park West, this
very large project is not a masterpiece and would look more at
home in a Houston or Dallas suburb. The angled towers are deceptively
thin and their facades are studded, which adds a discrete visual
interest. In terms of massing, the project is not as interesting
as the more rugged One Central Park Place and not as glistening
as Philip Johnson's design of the glass facade at the Trump International
Hotel on the north side of Columbus Circle and not as picturesque
as the former Huntington Hartford Gallery of Art on the south
side of the circle whose facade was demolished in 2006 over the
protests of many preservationists (see The
City Review article) and 240 Central Park south on the east
side of the circle (see The City Review
article).

Nonetheless, this massive
project is definitely more attractive than the banal New York
Coliseum complex it replaced. Indeed, its completion is notable
given the site's controversial history.

The controversy over its
development was almost as dramatic as that over the redevelopment
of 42nd Street, which eventually resulted in the very successful
renaissance of the Times Square district.

This area, on the other
hand, was not in need of new "urban renewal" as that
function had been served by the creation several decades before
of Lincoln Center.

View
of Time Warner Center from roof of Metropolitan Museum of Art

The terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, however, changed the psyche of the city.

In its October 15, 2001
issue, Crain's New York Business gave the following commentary
about this project that it termed "The Next Rockefeller Center":

"There seems to be
no end to the superlatives used to describe the emerging AOL Time
Warner complex at Columbus Circle: The biggest construction project
in New York City since the World Trade Center. The largest construction
loan for a private project in U.S. History. The next Rockefeller
Center. When it opens in late summer or fall of 2003, the complex
will have five floors of stores and restaurants, 1.1 million square
feet of offices, Jazz at Lincoln Center, a hotel, TV studios and
more. Perhaps the biggest impact of the project is an unanticipated
and symbolic one: Just as the city's two tallest towers have been
destroyed, two more that eerily resemble them are slowing rising
uptown."

While the modernism of this
project is uninspired, its presence is hard to ignore and is further
proof that the West Side has arrived. Indeed, perhaps the
most significant part of the project is its luxury hotel component,
which is extremely sumptuous.

Its top apartments have
fetched very impressive prices, reinforcing New Yorkers' affection
for twin towers will continue.

"The
Donald" (Trump) put up a sign atop his neighboring tower
shortly before the opening of Time Warner Center to suggest his
project had better views

There is a lot of traffic here but also excellent
public transportation and the project is only a few blocks south
of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. There are no balconies
and no roof deck, but the hotel has a spa.

Despite some quibbles, this is New York's most
impressive mixed-use building. It could have been considerably
taller as no one seems to care any more about the shadows!

It is slick and its public spaces are spacious
although one is surprised that more people leaning on the mall's
rails don't get vertigo, an indication perhaps that New Yorkers
and tourists alike are starved for grandeur. The mall, while it
smacks of suburban shopping, is pretty grand.

In their great book, "New York 1960, Architecture
and Urbanism Between The Second World War and The Bicentennial,"
(The Monacelli Press, 1995), Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins
and David Fishman provide the following commentary about the New
York Coliseum:

"By the end of World War II Columbus Circle,
the Upper West Side's principal gateway, had become the slightly
seedy northern terminus of the theater district, home to such
theaters as the Cosmopolitan Theater (John Duncan, 1904); Joseph
Urban (1923). Postwar activity began with a proposal for a new
indoor sports arena in 1946. A 25,000-seat facility intended to
supplement Madison Square Garden, the arena was the brainchild
of the Garden's president, General John Reed Kilpatrick, and Robert
Moses, who proposed it in combination with a 200,000-square-foot
exhibition and convention space. Difficulties in obtaining funding
authorization in Albany, as well as the growth of television -
which cut down the audiences willing to pay to attend sporting
events - stalled the project. In December 1952 Robert Moses, in
his dual roles as chairman of the Mayor's Committee on Slum Clearance
and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, secured
federal funds for the redevelopment of two blocks immediately
west of Columbus Circle, which were combined to create a site
big enough for a major convention and exhibition facility to be
known as the Coliseum. The new building would fill the void left
in 1951 by the conversion of the Grand Central Palace (Warren
& Wetmore, 1911) into an office building. Moses proposed to
meet the site-acquisition costs with funds obtained through the
new federal Title I program, which was intended to help clear
slums and build affordable housing. Because the program required
that projects receiving funding must be dominated by residential
construction, Moses dedicated more than half the site to residential
purposes, although he counted the land used for parking as part
of the housing. Acquisition costs for the site, bounded by Columbus
Circle, Broadway, Columbus Avenue, West Fifty-eighth and West
Sixtieth streets, were very high, in fact the highest ever in
the nation, six times the average cost of a typical Title I project
in New York....The site also brought with it problems of tenant
relocation: 243 families lived on the site, along with 362 hotel-
and rooming-house occupants. And in addition to the former Cosmopolitan
Theater, which was being used by NBC for some of its most popular
television programs, the site included the twenty-two-story Gotham
National Bank (Sommerfeld & Steckler, 1920). The Coliseum
project was challenged in the courts when a pawnbroker named Kaskel
sued the city, claiming that the site was not a slum. Despite
expert testimony by William C. Vladeck, president of the Citizens'
Housing and Planning Council, who claimed that only 10 percent
of the tenements were substandard or unsanitary and only 2 percent
of the site was a slum, New York State's highest court denied
the plaintiff's objections by a vote of 5 to 2. Although Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill were at one point rumored to have been selected
to design the Coliseum, the job was ultimately awarded to Leon
and Lionel Levy, who had been associated with the project since
its conception, in consultation with John B. Peterkin, Aymar Embury
II and Eggers & Higgins. Preliminary designs called for a
fluted, boxlike building that confronted the circle's concavity
with a giant convex curve swinging from Fifty-eighth to Sixtieth
Street. Joseph Addonizio, of the West of Central Park Association,
characterized it as 'oversized salt box'; Albert S. Bard, of the
City Club, called the design 'just plain punk.' By May 1954, when
construction got under way, the design had evolved into a facility
combining a twenty-story, 241-foot-tall, 533,000-square-foot office
tower running east-west along Fifty-Eighth Street - a programmatic
element not included in the original plan - with a four-story,
273,672-square-foot exhibition hall (half again as big as Grand
Central Palace), an 850-car underground garage and two 300-family,
red-brick-clad, slab-like apartment houses designed by Sylvan and
Robert Bien for the site's western end. The final design not only
lacked the auditorium that such facilities usually have but also
the 6,000 fixed balcony seats originally planned to overlook the
exhibition hall's main floor, which would have helped it better
function for the kinds of large meetings that were often key features
of business and political conventions. The Coliseum faced Columbus
Circle with a 421-foot-long, 106-foot-high windowless wall, which
was clad in light gray brick above a dark granite base and adorned
only with four eleven-foot-square aluminum medallions, designed
by Paul Manship....Not only did the broad, ponderous rectilinear
mass disregard the circle's geometry, it also blocked the axis
of Fifty-ninth Street, which was demapped through the site. To
minimize congestion and compensate for the loss of this street,
Fifty-eighth and Sixtieth streets were widened.....The building's
design, which Moses characterized as 'conservative modern,' satisfied
few observers. Just as construction was about to begin, Art
News editor Alfred M. Frankfurter blasted the design....Frankfurter
felt the building's design was 'pedestrian' and riddled with 'hybrid
pseudo-modern detail.'....Moses was handed a copy of Frankfurter's
editorial as he arrived late at the dinner; as the event's principal
speaker, he made indirect reference to the attack, telling his
audience that public officials had no right to experiment on a
big scale.'...The Coliseum opened on April 28, 1956....From the
first the Coliseum was a building New Yorkers loved to hate....To
many architects the most galling aspect of the Coliseum complex
was not its bland and boxlike appearance but its complete disregard
for the geometric challenge posed by Columbus Circle....In 1957,
John Barrington Bayley, an architect trained in Modernism under
Walter Gropius at Harvard but now converted to the cause of a
revived Classicism, proposed a scheme that ringed the circle with
a colossal portico and enclosed galleries honoring the dead of
World War II and the Korean War....Bayley also proposed a new
pedestrian plaza for the center, raised above the level of traffic,
and a grand Bernini-inspired stairway leading to a new concert
hall and opera house, presumably sited at the southwest corner
of Eighth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street....In 1961, the circle
was modestly spruced up when Douglas Leigh, the creator of outdoor
advertising spectaculars, contributed thirty-six fountains in
two tiers to ring the base of the rostral column carrying Gaetano
Russo's statue of Columbus. In 1968, the Triborough Bridge and
Tunnel Authority proposed to augment the Coliseum complex by bridging
Sixtieth Street with an expanded exhibition hall identical to
the original and by constructing a new office building on the
northwest corner of Broadway and Sixtieth Street, again nearly
identical to its original counterpart. Contemplating the TBTA's
aerial perspective drawing of the expanded scheme, Ada Louise
Huxtable...[declared that] this plan would 'put the final stamp
of spoilage on what could have been one of the city's handsomest
public spaces, if anyone had cared.' The TBTA's expansion plans
did not go forward."

The city eventually built a new convention
center, the Jacob K. Javits center along the Hudson River north
of 35th Street, because the Coliseum was no longer able to attract
major conventions and exhibitions because of its small size.

In time, the city sought to redevelop the Coliseum
site and in the late 1980s invited developers to bid on the site,
ushering in a new era of controversy for the site.

Moshe Safdie's
Coliseum plan

"In a first round of fantasies,"
wrote Elliot Willensky and Norval White in their excellent book,
"The A.I.A. Guide to New York City Architecture, Fourth Edition,"
(Three Rivers Press, 2000), "the old Coliseum would have
given way to a dual set of enormous towers (Moshe Safdie, architect),
a new colossus that threatened to throw an elongated shadow across
the lawns of Central Park while exacerbating the traffic volume
at this node in the Broadway corridor. Round two was initiated
by the pullout of a key tenant and the winning of a lawsuit brought
against the City and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority
by the Municipal Art Society and allied groups, who charged double-dealing.
The resultant rethinking brought a new round of proposals by myriad
developers and architects. The winning scheme has a somewhat milder
intensity of development and David Childs of Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill is at its helm."

An early design by David Childs called for
a twin-towered project that was stylistically similarly, albeit
much larger, to some of the great Art Deco-style twin-tower residential
skyscrapers of Central Park West. His final design for Time Warner
Center was scaled down somewhat and is not as pretty as his earlier
design.

While the retail component of the Time Warner
Center is upscale, if not upper scale, the project's mix of mega-supermarket,
super deluxe hotel, expensive restaurants, offices, expensive
apartments and a jazz facility is impressive.

In his superb book, "Upper West Side Story,
a History and Guide," (Abbeville Press, 1989), Peter Salwen
notes that a century ago Columbus Circle was pretty lively:

"At Bustanoby's Domino Room, Broadway
and 60th Street, the patronage was half Broadway, half Fifth Avenue.
Bustanoby's was declared in bold black and white, a theme carried
into the furniture, draperies and even the china, with what one
regular called 'a completely equipped turkey-trotting department
in a ballroom at the rear of the main restaurant.'....By night,
Columbus Circle was brilliant with light. 'On all the surrounding
buildings are great electric signs,' reported one habitué.
'Long rows of steely electric arc-lights disappear in dwindling
perspectives far down the intersecting streets. From six directions
electric cars - moving clusters of light - dash across the center
of the Circle, while from high up, at the top of its tall column,
the statue of Columbus looks down, moody and dark.' At Reisenweber's,
on the Circle's southern edge, people even went to dance at teatime,
in the afternoon. Here was an establishment that spread out and
up through three adjoining buildings and astonished with a stream
of entertainment novelties. To Reisenweber's came Maurice Mouvet,
the sleek, swivel-hipped original of a hundred silent-film gigolos,
an international figure (actually born in Brooklyn, though he
posed successfully as a romantic Latin) who had introduced the
danse des Apaches to Paris and the tango to New York....Reisenweber's
was the loudest, if not the gaudiest, of the lobster-palaces....In
the vast, red-carpeted dining room - capacity 750 - New York saw
its first floor show, complete with dancing girls and a revue
staged by Gus Edwards and climaxed by the Five Jansleys, who performed
heart-stopping acrobatic feats atop a fifty-foot ladder. The turkey
trot, most memorable step of the ragtime era, was introduced in
Reisenweber's Hawaiian Room. In the rooftop dance hall, Sophie
Tucker, the Red Hot Mama, would look around to see who had come
that night, shake hands with the customers at some of the built-in
settees, and launch into a program that ranged from the frankly
suggestive to the sentimental and mawkishly patriotic....Another
high point for Reisenweber's came in January 1917, when cornetist
Nick La Rocca opened there with a five-piece group he called The
Original Dixieland Jass Band. They were a phenomenal success....Within
a month the ODJB recorded 'At the Darktown Strutters' Ball'....On
the circle, even the standardized, sanitized Child's Cafeteria
had glamor. F. Scott Fitzgerald described it at 4 A.M.: 'Within
its pale but sanitary walls one finds a noisy medley of chorus
girls, college boys, debutantes, rakes, filles de joie
- a not unrepresentiative mixture of the gayest of Broadway, and
even of Fifth Avenue.' And when night ended, 'the great plate-glass
front turned to a deep creamy blue, the color of a Maxfield Parrish
moonlight - a blue that seemed to press close upon the pane as
if to crowd its way into the restaurant. Dawn had come up in Columbus
Circle, magical, breathless dawn, silhouetting the great statue
of the immortal Christopher, and mingling in a curious and uncanny
manner with the fading yellow electric light inside.'"

View from fountains in Columbus Circle

Fitzgerald neglected to mention cigarette smoke
and in early 2004 Mayor Bloomberg's anti-smoking edicts and reports
that noise should not be tolerated late at night suggest that
Columbus Circle may never fully regain its raucous past even as
it becomes more rarefied.

Nighttime illumination
at top of towers

At the end of 2004, lights were turned on atop
both the towers. They were several stories high and quite impressive.